From Connecticut woods to East African grasslands

NORTH CANAAN, Conn. — Dr. Daniel Peppe, a North Canaan Elementary School and Hotchkiss alum, is a professor of Geosciences at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

When he is not teaching both intro and graduate level courses, he can be found conducting research across the globe. In short, his work focuses on the evolutionary processes of plants and animals in response to climate change. Having conducted fieldwork in the U.S. Midwest, Australia and Abu Dhabi, Peppe has settled for Eastern Africa.

While in graduate school at Yale University, Peppe lived in the forests of Uganda with his wife, who at the time was researching chimpanzee behavior. It was there that he was put in contact with a geologist in Kenya who was looking for an extra set of hands at a fossil site.

Over the past 20 years, he has continued his work in East Africa, collaborating with both local and international geologists. Each trip lasts about a month and involves moving from site to site.

“The work I do is like building a puzzle, I have all these pieces that need to be put together,” Peppe said.

To build the puzzle of what the landscape looked like in Africa 15-20 million years ago, his team uses paleobotany and ecological methods. The “pieces of the puzzle” range from climate patterns to plant and animal communities. Once put together they provide the team with a reconstructed version of the ancient ecosystem. From there, Peppe can estimate how the ecosystem impacted the natural life that once inhabited it.

A recent focus of Peppe’s work has been on C4 plants, which refer to warm-season grasses.

With his team, he set out to answer the question “when did C4 plants evolve in Kenya and why?”

Unbeknownst to him, the data he would later find would completely shift the timeline of African geology. Peppe’s team found that these plants, which are imperative to interpreting the evolution of mammals, including humans, could be dated back 10 million years earlier than previously documented.

This finding then led to their second breakthrough. It was previously claimed that traits and characteristics of apes had developed through their reliance on dense forest as habitat.

However, coupled with the earlier dating of warm-season grasses, Peppe’s team was able to connect apes’ evolution to both types of vegetation.

Peppe’s passion for nature started long before his academic career. Growing up in the Northwest Corner “really had an impact,” he reflected. As a kid he worked his way from Cub Scout to Eagle Scout. His Eagle Scout project was making trail signs for the North Canaan Greenway.

Despite far flung adventures, Peppe still reveres the Northwest Corner. “I think a lot of people overthink where we live,” Peppe said. “It is full of interesting geology.”

When at Yale, his class went on a field trip to the Falls Village Falls, a place that he associated with childhood memories, not coursework, like fishing in the Blackberry River and hiking Mt. Riga.

“I love what I do,” Peppe said. “I get to be outdoors, working with people, discovering new things.”